Democracy Now! has long covered the issue of climate change. We reported from the U.N. Climate Change Conferences in Warsaw, Doha, Durban, Cancún, and Copenhagen, and from the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change hosted by Bolivia. We’ve interviewed many of the world’s top scientists, writers, policy makers, activists, indigenous leaders and academics on the issue. We continue to follow the environmental movements to directly confront the root causes of global warming, and to advocate for climate justice, and sustainable alternatives.

Hurricane Irene caused significant beach erosion as it made landfall at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a 200-mile-long string of barrier islands. It also crashed into the Jersey Shore, Long Island and other popular East Coast beaches this weekend. Many of these areas are filled with high-priced oceanfront real estate, and the battle to save these beaches and communities costs billions of dollars each year. We speak with Ben Kalina, who...

A new study has found that that often war is associated with global climate change. According to the report, there are links between the climate phenomenon El Niño and outbreaks of violence in countries from southern Sudan to Indonesia and Peru. The scientists find that El Niño, which brings hot and dry conditions to tropical nations, doubles the risk of civil war in up to 90 countries, and may help account for a fifth of conflicts worldwide...

The United Nations has called an emergency meeting to discuss the Horn of Africa drought, which it says has already claimed tens of thousands of lives. Famine was declared in two regions of Somalia on Wednesday where 3.7 million people are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. Another eight million people need food assistance in neighboring countries including Kenya and Ethiopia. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the...

In part two of our conversation with journalist Christian Parenti, he discusses what the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Japan means for the expansion of nuclear power in the United States, and how the focus on atomic power diverts funds from the transition to clean technology. [includes rush transcript]

Extreme weather from Texas to Somalia may indicate that a new era of climate war is upon us. Just this month, massive floods have shut down two nuclear power facilities in Nebraska. In New Mexico, the nation’s top nuclear weapons lab in Los Alamos is being threatened by an uncontrolled wildfire. Meanwhile, the United Nations warns the Horn of Africa is facing its worst drought in 60 years, affecting more than 10 million in Djibouti,...

Read the first chapter of "Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence," by award-winning writer Christian Parenti, who was interviewed today on Democracy Now! In the book he explores how, from Africa to Asia, extreme weather brought on by global warming is unleashing cascades of unrest and violence.

The media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadillos. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”? We need modern-day...

2011 has already become the deadliest year for tornado outbreaks in the United States since 1953, with more than 500 people killed. Extreme weather has made headlines across the world, as well, with megafloods occurring in Colombia, Vietnam, Pakistan and Australia, even as the Amazon just faced its second hundred-year drought in the past five years. News audiences are seeing the warning "severe weather" increasingly flash across TV...

This week the United Nations General Assembly discussed international standards that grant nature equal rights to humans. Similar protocols have been adopted by over a dozen U.S. municipalities, as well as Bolivia and Ecuador. Renowned environmentalists Maude Barlow and Vandana Shiva join us. Says Shiva, "Most civilizations of the world, for most of human history, have seen the world in terms of relatedness and connection,” says Shiva....

More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to mobilize around the issue of climate change at the Power Shift 2011 conference. Van Jones, a longtime environmental advocate and former green jobs adviser in the Obama White House, gave the keynote address. "We pull out of the ground death, and we burn it in our engines. And we burn death in our power plants, without ceremony," Jones said. "And then we act...